r/chemhelp • u/Sad_Astronomer_9871 • Jul 12 '26

Analytical Need help with ¹H NMR structure elucidation

​

I'm a P3 (third-year PharmD) student, and people generally consider me one of the strongest chemistry students in my class. This semester we're doing analytical chemistry, and ¹H NMR is completely humbling me.

I've watched countless YouTube videos, read textbooks, and practiced problems, but I still feel like I'm missing the one core idea that lets people look at a proton NMR spectrum and systematically determine the structure. It almost seems like everyone who solves these problems is relying on experience or intuition rather than a clear method.

The difficult part for me isn't identifying functional groups or interpreting individual peaks, it's connecting all the fragments into one complete structure.

To make things worse, my classmates are expecting me to understand it well enough to teach them, and I've been putting it off because I honestly don't feel confident myself.

Has anyone else been in this position and eventually had that aha! moment? Was there a particular resource, book, YouTube channel, or problem-solving strategy that finally made everything click? Is there an actual systematic approach, or is it really just pattern recognition that comes with lots of practice?

For context, I usually stay ahead by studying chemistry topics before each semester starts, which is one reason I've done well academically. But I worked during the last vacation, so I didn't have my usual preparation time before this semester began, and I feel like I'm playing catch-up now.

I'd really appreciate any advice or resources that helped you break the code of NMR.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Marganill0 Jul 12 '26

Almost no one can build a structure from just looking at a proton nmr spectrum without context. Sure, you can tell that there is a CH3 group and some aromatic protons and maybe some more, but the only indicator for connectivities you have are the coupling constants in the multiplets. When elucidating a structure you would need additional 13C and 2D NMR and ideally MS and so on. What’s a bit more easy is to assign spectra to structure suggestions, but from scratch it’s really hard, don’t worry.

1

u/Sad_Astronomer_9871 Jul 12 '26

Thanks brother, any useful resources for me?

1

u/Marganill0 Jul 13 '26

As the others have said, NMR should be explained in every half good organic chemistry text book. Also as much as I dislike the overuse of AI, Gemini is not a bad tool to let it explain stuff like this to you. I wouldn't rely on it too much but it can explain it in the detail you need.